Category Archives: Culture

Gun Control and Reality

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I go back and forth on this gun control thing.  Growing up in rural Texas with a father who hunted and who during the Cuban missile crisis got his rifle out of the closet and got it ready, I favor the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.  I cannot imagine that the founders who, however elitist, did not recognize the dangers of new settlers making their way unarmed through the wild forests of a new country.  It is nonsense to think that individual citizens cannot protect themselves.  And I cannot imagine that anyone would think that citizens cannot use whatever means to defend themselves against oppression.  Think Hafez al Assad in Syria and his father, Bashar al Assad, or Joe Arpaio of Arizona for that matter. I am glad Hispanics or Latinos have the Second Amendment as their last resort.

On the other hand, the violence wrought by handguns and the possession of larger weapons really is a wholly different matter.  But how do you control the possession of arms so that someone like the shooter in Denver today would not have been able to do the damage he did this morning?

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Bloomberg: A National Hero

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New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a national hero, not the wannabe fascist overseer of an emerging nanny state as his critics maintain.  Sigh.  Had the HispanicLatino community a leader with the stature and political and financial standing of a Bloomberg and his bravura!  Bloomberg, of course, has taken aggressive stances on smoking and other public health issues, and he now wants to eliminate the super-sized sodas ballooning the national waistline.  Some of the criticism coming his way so far has not come from the seriously overweight HispanicLatino community.

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Chief Justice Roberts: A Catholic in the Making

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I do not know John Roberts.  Never met the man.  I have been reading about him for years.  Could not avoid him, really.  Upon any vacancy or near-vacancy on the Supreme Court, Republican insiders incessantly pumped him as a rising jurist and, lo and behold, he now sits as Chief Justice.  I do not know Antonin Scalia either.  Observed him once at a reception.  Said to be an intellectual.  He seemed to be enjoying what he was eating and drinking.

Both men were raised Catholic, something I do know about, and it might shed light beyond Linda Greenhouse’s contribution in The New York Times and the notable, or not so notable, depending on your view, reporting of Jan Crawford of CBS about Roberts changing his vote at the last minute to uphold The Affordable Care Act. The reasons for his switch are as speculated upon as they are myriad in number.  But I wonder if Roberts’ vote was the result of the good Catholic gene winning over the bad Catholic gene that burdens all Catholics, including Scalia, who no one can doubt from his increasing vitriolic and bitter dissents has let his bad Catholic gene run amuck.

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The Unintended Paradox of Arizona

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Nothing defines an individual more than a different identity being thrust upon him or her. It is more important than just one moment, and it in the long run might be pivotal for the country.  It might convert a leaderless community into one of action — for America’s good.. 

The massive attention given to the Supreme Court decision on Arizona represents only a part of our passage into the new time we are privileged to witness, although many of us will have to adjust our vision to it, as if entering a room suddenly lit.  The intense speculation over the HispanicLatino vote in the presidential race is but another component of the point of no return.  Things HispanicLatino have become and will forever be, with growing strength, a part of the national consciousness.  The Dream Act.  The penetration of the HispanicLatino image into mainstream advertising.  The changing demography.  Unending elections and perennial electoral calculations.  All are real departure points rooted in change but now intensified by the necessity of HispanicLatinos to prove their citizenship by showing their papers until the last remaining part of Arizona is declared unconstitutional. 

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The Fundamental Choice Mexicans Face

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The Mexican presidential debate last night might have changed the course of the election, scheduled for July 1.  But probably not as much as a student-led revolt against the return of the PRI – the party that dominated the country for more than five decades under governments that were feeble excuses for democracy.  The polls supposed that the Partido Revolucionario Institucional would return to power but now show that perhaps the election was called too early.  Students took to the streets and the internet and seem to have reminded their fellow Mexicans of the PRI’s history.  The students shouting in the streets certainly reminded me of the day in 1990 that Luis Donaldo Colossio two years before he was assassinated looked at me across the conference table in our newspaper editorial board room, a quizzical expression on his face.

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Gail Does Texas

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So Gail Collins sorta ruined my weekend.  The columnist for The New York Times could not have known that I had not planned to pick up another book this week, especially with the EuroCup competition starting today.  Still recovering from Robert Caro’s latest forest-killer on Lyndon Johnson, I thought I had made enough time for a story about the history of the Mossad.  Reading about LBJ and about how Israel ruthlessly wages universal war against its enemies is not easy.  It is going to take me longer to read 200 pages of Collins’ As Texas Goes... as 1,000 pages of Caro.  Laughing consumes more time than you think.  It has been years since I went from beef and bourbon to cotton candy, and you know how long that takes to eat.

There no doubt will be more to say on Collins’ book (on page 32 so far) but I saw her hawking it on MSNBC on Wednesday.  In the ensuing discussion with Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, none of them could put a finger on why Texans feels their state is so special.  They like most people could not get beyond the surprise that, for good and bad, Texans care a lot about their state – a state that seems to have inordinate influence over the nation’s life, as Collins believes.

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The President’s Hair: To Reminisce

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The Washington Post running the photograph of the little black youngster feeling President Obama’s hair to see if it was like his was probably lost on some people.  What it must have meant for that little boy in the process of finding his identity and his manhood.  And however it might be emblematic of other things, it represents also the time and point in which America always finds itself.  The kid could have been a white boy that age, or a HispanicLatino kid.  Upon seeing the image, my mind travelled back to another moment decades ago.

I remember shepherding a class of about 20 seventh-grade black kids to Monterrey, Mexico, on a field trip from Houston, a trip of about 500 miles.  It might have been a trip to the moon – for the kids and hosts alike, not to mention the teacher-chaperones.  Upon our arrival at the hotel, some of the hotel’s staff actually touched the hair of my students, and some of the clerks kissed their foreheads.  My students giggled.  I was embarrassed and touched at the same time – and confused.

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Lyndon Baines Johnson: The first HispanicLatino — and black — President

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Years ago, when Bill Clinton was styled as America’s first black President, more than a few Americans, knowing it to be hyperbole, were tolerantly amused.  It was fun to appreciate the direct connection the African American community and he shared but, of course, along came Barack Obama.  My bemusement at the Clinton pretext stemmed from the wanton disregard of Lyndon Johnson’s role in cracking open the world for African Americans – and HispanicLatinos simultaneously.  After decades of oppression, minority communities began to emerge from their suppressed selves because of Johnson.  LBJ was America’s first black president politically and America’s first HispanicLatino president, to boot.

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Census Bureau News Shatters History

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People remember specifically where they were the moment they heard John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas in 1963.  Very few of us will remember – since no one knows exactly when it happened – the moment that “white” births in the nation fell below 50 percent, most likely sometime in early 2011.  Yet in comparison, the news that HispanicLatinos, blacks, Asians and those of mixed are giving birth to a new majority is by far more important than what happened in Dallas, although it certainly was not caught on film.

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A Generational Responsibility: Understanding Oneself

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In its storied history, America has had to rely on specific generations to make enormous personal sacrifices for the country’s sake.  One generation fought to create the country; another generation struggled to keep it whole and not let it disappear into disunion; another generation beat back fascism; others outlasted communism; and another now fights international terrorism.   HispanicLatinos are no different.  They are a new generation of Americans being asked to save and to hold their country for a far greater purpose than the vast majority of HispanicLatinos might have ever considered – except that many of them start behind the social, economic and political curve.  And the dimensions of the responsibility they bear are daunting.  How to help save a country that seems in decline internally is no small task.

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